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100+ Reasons #SpaceApps Made a Difference

April 25, 2012 by Nick Skytland

Open Data

International Space Apps Challenge

Solutions

Open Source

hackathon

The International Space Apps Challenge, held on 21-22 April 2012, was a very productive event. 100+ solutions were developed in less than 48 hours, and although a few teams are still submitting their solutions to the website, we wanted to provide a summary of the 100+ reasons what you did at the event made a difference! We have listed out all unique solutions submitted below, in alphabetical order, and included a one or two sentence elevator-pitch description of each. We have also included a link to the solution page if you are interested in finding out more information about the solution, want to view or download the code, share a comment, contact the team, or in some cases view a demo or prototype of the solution itself. If you are one of the participants and would like to improve the description we have for your project, please email us your updates at coreteam@spaceappschallenge.org.

Each location had the opportunity to nominate up to two winning solutions for consideration in the Global Judging process. The solutions thare were nominated are identified as well. Congratulations to everyone who contributed to one of the solutions below – the results truly speak for themselves.

A data schema attempts to capture the commonalities between datasets acquired by NASA to allow citizen scientists and data mining softwares to quickly locate relevant datasets required to answer questions posed in broad terms, such as “Has the sea level risen in the last 10 years?”

Data majic is a remote data acquisition and control system aimed at collecting data about a wind turbine. The system monitors the periodic status of the wind turbine and reports to an SMS server from where the information can be analyzed and visualized.

A solution to display the results of a Foosball game digitally using a web client, motion sensors and an arduino board. The display can also be used as a countdown display for anything (such as a rocket launch).

A tool that allows a humanitarian in the field to upload their data in a way that can be aggregated and queried. The application accepts excel files of any structure, has a user interface for annotating them, and converts them to hxl, a format for capturing unstructured semantic data.

A mobile web app that allows users on mobile phones and tablets to browse the very high resolution map images of Mars, and a Web Standards based platform on top of it for educational/citizen science applications.

An app that uses NASA weather satellite data to bring carbon footprint computation down to the individual level, allowing trends to be associated with decisions people make based on weather conditions and convenience of transportation options.

An app that brings website widget interaction and querying of images to mobile platform so that users can see how the world changes based on categories of surface temperature, chlorophyll concentration, water vapor, carbon monoxide concentration, radiation, active fires, snow cover, cloud fraction, leaf area index, net primary productivity, population, and vegetation index.

A desktop client that takes solar wind speed live from the web and produces an animation of the current wind speeds. The same feed is also used by an Arduino to show the live intensity of the solar winds by lighting more lights the more intense the winds.

A physical demonstration of the relative position of the International Space Station using an “ISSDuck” printed on a 3D printer, that floats on water, which is disrupted through a rudder controlled by an arduino and servo motor.